Drought

Bush Bull

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By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley – Re-Blogged From WUWT

This will be a long posting, because it is necessary to nail the childish myth that global warming caused the bushfires in Australia. The long, severe drought in Australia, culminating in the most extensive bushfires in recent history, ought to have aroused sympathy for the cattle-ranchers who have lost their livestock and the citizens who have lost their homes. But no. Instead, those who profiteer by asserting that global warming is the cause of every extreme-weather event have rushed to state – falsely – that an “overwhelming scientific consensus” (to cite the Greens’ website) blames the incidence, extent, duration and severity of the drought and bushfires on the somewhat warmer weather caused by our having increased the atmospheric CO2 concentration by about 1 part in 10,000 from 0.03% to 0.04% by volume.

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Ten Climate Change Exaggerations

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Columbia University have released a statement on all the ways global warming will allegedly impact our lives. But like many such efforts the claimed impacts fail to consider simple adaptions already practiced by people who live in warm climates.

My comments in italics

10 Climate Change Impacts That Will Affect Us All

BY RENEE CHO |DECEMBER 27, 2019

1. Damage to your home

Floods, the most common and deadly natural disasters in the U.S., will likely be exacerbated and intensified by sea level rise and extreme weather.

Even if this is a problem, the solution is flood control, like our politicians should be doing anyway but all too frequently don’t – dredging rivers, building and maintaining dams, pumps and diversion channels. And decent drainage infrastructure, like municipal authorities build in the tropics, to rapidly remove large volumes of rainwater from tropical downpours, before they cause any harm.

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Wet Years, Dry Years

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By Willis Eschenbach – Re-Blogged From WUWT

I keep reading all kinds of claims that the slight warming we’ve been experiencing over the last century has already led to an increase in droughts. A few years ago there were a couple of very dry years here in California, and the alarmists were claiming that “global warming” had put us into “permanent drought”.

Of course, the rains returned. This season we’re at about 120% of normal … it’s called “weather”.

In any case, I thought I’d take a look at the severity of droughts in the US over the last century. I always like to take a look at the longest dataset I can find. In this case, I got the data from NOAA’s CLIMDIV dataset. Figure 1 shows the monthly variations from 1895 to the present. Note that I’ve inverted the Y-axis on the graph, so higher on the graph is dryer, and down near the bottom is wetter.

Figure 1. Monthly Palmer Drought Severity Index for the continental US, 1895-2019. Above the dashed line is dryer, below the line is wetter.

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Water Scarcity in Cape Town

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By Michael Stahl – weather.com

In January 2018, officials in Cape Town — a port city on South Africa’s southwest coast that’s home to four million people — announced that the municipality was running out of water. By then, Cape Town had experienced three consecutive years of drought, culminating with its most arid year on record in 2017. Legislators believed that on April 12, 2018, they would be forced to shut down the entire water-supply system until local reservoirs somehow became reinvigorated.

Theewaterskloof Dam during Cape Town water crisis

(Getty Images/Evan Hallein)

Desperate Efforts to Drag the Climate Change Drought Narrative Back on Track

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT 

Aussie Climate Scientists are rushing to fill the breach caused by Professor Andy Pitman’s stunning admission there is no long term drying trend in drought prone Australia.

 

Link between climate change and drought
h/t JoNova – a slide from Professor Pitman’s presentation in June 2019

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Climate Change Could Revive Medieval Megadroughts in US Southwest

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By Earth Institute at Columbia U – Re-Blogged From EurekAlert

About a dozen megadroughts struck the American Southwest during the 9th through the 15th centuries, but then they mysteriously ceased around the year 1600. What caused this clustering of megadroughts — that is, severe droughts that last for decades — and why do they happen at all?

If scientists can understand why megadroughts happened in the past, it can help us better predict whether, how, and where they might happen in the future. A study published today in Science Advances provides the first comprehensive theory for why there were megadroughts in the American Southwest. The authors found that ocean temperature conditions plus high radiative forcing — when Earth absorbs more sunlight than it radiates back into space — play important roles in triggering megadroughts. The study suggests an increasing risk of future megadroughts in the American Southwest due to climate change.

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